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Bluetooth Headset

As I was contemplating making angry calls to my hosting provider last week when they shut down MaisonBisson for a couple days, it occurred to me that I would rather make those calls via SkypeOut or some similar service that didn’t reveal my home phone number. After all, I wouldn’t want an angry sysop to take revenge by having a spare modem call me up every 27 minutes between the hours of midnight and seven AM.

I’m ashamed to admit that it was at that moment that I decided to buy a Bluetooth headset. Trust me, I’d been thinking about it for a while and I had other, good uses in mind, but that was the moment.

You can probably imagine my shock when the OS X Bluetooth Setup Assistant told me my hardware didn’t support headsets. As it turns out, I hadn’t bothered to install the Bluetooth firmware update, released all the way back in November 2004. The big clue arrived in this MacDevCenter article about Bluetooth headsets and OS X.

But with the Bluetooth update installed, I quickly paired the headset with my 15“ aluminum PowerBook and was able to configure iChat to use it. None of my logged-in buddies were audio chat enabled, though, so I ambled over to Gizmo Project, a VOIP app similar to Skype. I was making calls in no time, and the recorded conversations reveal good sound quality from both ends of the call.

Then, with a change in the OS X System Preferences app, I was routing all audio output to the headset and listening to iTunes. Audio quality with music sounded like 22 KHz, but I didn’t buy this monophonic headset to listen to music.

4 thoughts on “Bluetooth Headset”

Thinking of buying one, specifically the BlueAnt X5 Stereo Bluesooth Headset but reading the discussions on the apple forum it all seems to tricky! I bought a mac because things just work, but it looks like bluetooth headsets are one thing that doesn’t “just work!